When was the low point? Harold Neumeister can't remember anymore. Mental illness
and durg addiction have robbed his mind, leaving blank spaces where the hurt
used to be. What he knows is this: he was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in
1947, the son of a man consumed by
alcohol and rage, a man who terrorized him and abused his mother.

The family moved continually as the father switched from job to job, and
Harold attended 44 different schools. But each new home - in housing progjects,
motels and shanties - echoed with the same cacophony: screaming and profanity.
There were no dreams in Harold's house.

Maybe that's why Christmas was so hard. Other kids sat on Santa's lap and
asked for ponies or race cars. They had brightly lit tress in their homes.
"In school, they'd talk about their Christmas, their presents." Harold got
no Christmas, not even a visit to Santa. And that makes his strange odyssey
from a cheerles child to a jolly St. Nick all the more surprising.

His mom eventually left his dad and moved to Cincinnati, where Harold finished
high school and enlisted in the Army. After serving in Vietnam, he got a job
as an insurance salesman and married. But the next 20 years were a sage of
booze and drugs, of exhilarating highs and suicidals lows. He lost it all -
job, wife, children, home. For four years, he lived under overpasses and in
cardboard boxes, in and out of jail for shoplifting. Once, he climbed to the
roof of the 50-story Carew Tower, planning to jump. Security men hauled him
away.